Somewhat about the technology but more interesting is the culture and organization they’ve created to work with it.

A Conversation with Werner Vogels - Coverage of Amazon’s transition to a service-based architectureDiscipline and Focus - Additional coverage of Amazon’s transition to a service-based architectureVogels on ScalabilitySOA creates order out of chaos @ AmazonGoogle

Papers that describe various important elements of distributed systems design.

Distributed Computing Economics - Jim GrayRules of Thumb in Data Engineering - Jim Gray and Prashant ShenoyFallacies of Distributed Computing - Peter DeutschImpossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process - also known as FLP [access requires account and/or payment, a free version can be found here]Unreliable Failure Detectors for Reliable Distributed Systems. A method for handling the challenges of FLPLamport Clocks - How do you establish a global view of time when each computer’s clock is independentThe Byzantine Generals ProblemLazy Replication: Exploiting the Semantics of Distributed ServicesScalable Agreement - Towards Ordering as a ServiceScalable Eventually Consistent Counters over Unreliable Networks - Scalable counting is tough in an unreliable worldLanguages and Tools